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The anterior cingulate and reward-guided selection of actions.

Hadland KA., Rushworth MFS., Gaffan D., Passingham RE.

Macaques were taught a reward-conditional response selection task; they learned to associate each of two different actions to each of two different rewards and to select actions that were appropriate for particular rewards. They were also taught a visual discrimination learning task. Cingulate lesions significantly impaired selection of responses associated with different rewards but did not interfere with visual discrimination learning or performance. The results suggest that 1) the cingulate cortex is concerned with action reward associations and not limited to just detecting when actions lead to errors and 2) that the cingulate cortex's function is limited to action reinforcer associations and it is not concerned with stimulus reward associations.